Tag: upload

If you read the previous lesson, you can probably guess what this one is about.

After we finished uploading all of the questions, answers, files and the rest of information related to each of the lessons, the next step had to be done. This was the task of retrieving every-single-little-file that was used to upload information. They wanted to have a backup of information.

David, Larry’s cousin, was in charge of this. This took him..well… I think that to this day (about four years later), he hasn’t finished retrieving the information and I doubt that he will get it anytime soon.
Obviously this was more than expected. It wasn’t so much the idea that he couldn’t FIND all the information, because all he had to do was ask which person uploaded this or that subject. That wasn’t it.

They wanted to backup ONLY the information that was uploaded. That was quite a task, because maybe someone uploaded 10 questions but changed half of them while he was uploading them because they had mistakes of context. Or some answers were changed because the teacher who uploaded them thought they were way too easy for a high-school level student.
The process was done with very little time and many people were involved, so mistakes were bound to show up sooner or later.

So, which questions were changed? Who had them? And could we be sure that the files they had matched exactly what we had uploaded? No one knew.

I think that, at the end, they simply decided to not get those files but simply copy and paste the information on the site to an independent file. Again, more extra work that wouldn’t be needed if they just organized properly. The teachers, obviously, had to do this tedious copy-and-paste work.

In short, we copied and pasted the files to the system. Then we copied and pasted information from the system, to individual files.
Long story short, one more time, a consequence- an avoidable consequence- of the continuous lack of organization.